Big Button Music Player Was Named Truthfully

When it comes to designing a car music player, developer Robert Baker says bigger is better.

His app lets you choose between one comically large button, which can be assigned as play/pause or next track, or if you’re not into the whole brevity thing, you can switch to three still-pretty-big buttons for play/pause, skip, and back.

Big Button Music Player ($1) has been around the block a few times, touting itself as “the original” big button app. But only recently did Baker release an update that allows volume control by tapping the artist name, also incorporating for the first time the beloved single button option for that function.

With its “can’t possibly mess this up” functionality, there’s not much you could criticize here. It simply offers one of the simplest ways to control music playback on an iPhone while driving. Big Button Music Player is a fine choice for users looking to balance the simplest interface with a healthy selection of customization options, and indeed, it’s one of our top picks among car players.

You can turn off Auto-Lock, which prevents your iPhone from going to sleep and depriving you of single-tap access to that big button. The screensaver can be set to black or to display artist, track, and playback time, saving your eyes in the dark, and possibly your battery. Turning off album artwork makes the buttons — which we hear are quite large — even easier to see.

You can also customize the button and artwork brightness; we found that it worked best at 50 percent for artwork and 100 percent for buttons. Meanwhile, color control offers a seemingly infinite number of options for displaying title, artist, and time.